1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to providing demographic information over a network. The present invention also relates to customization of web pages and electronic advertising on web pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known to display an advertising banner at the upper portion of web pages to advertise products and services on the Internet. Usually, an advertising banner is randomly selected from a selection of advertisers. Although such advertising has been shown to be effective, it is very inefficient because the advertising banners may advertise particular products and services for which the viewing user would have little or no interest in purchasing. The only correlation with the interest of users is when the particular web page being viewed by a user was of interest to the user and the advertising banner was also somehow related to the content of the web page. For example, a web page of a real estate company might include advertising banners containing advertisements for mortgage companies.
A popular Internet search engine know as “Yahoo!” displays advertising banners on an upper portion of its web pages. Yahoo! appears to select a banner advertisement to display in accordance with a user's search request to the Yahoo! Internet search engine. For example, if you enter a search request for “music”, the banner advertisement that is displayed on the next displayed Yahoo! page would contain a music related advertisement. FIGS. 7–11 are graphical images of a series of web pages provided by Yahoo! for the example “music” search request example. Note that the advertising banner for “Music Connection” illustrated in FIG. 11 is the music related advertisement being displayed. This approach of Yahoo! which uses search terms tends to more be more efficient in selecting the advertising banner than the more common random selection. However, the Yahoo! approach remains inefficient because Yahoo! does not have any idea as to who is using the Yahoo! Internet search engine. As a result, advertising banners are still not able to be efficiently selected such that the advertising banner is targeted to the user or requester.
Thus, there is a need for improved banner advertising on the Internet whereby the advertising banners displayed or other portions of a web page are targeted and/or customized to a user so that the web page is more effective.